St. Thomas MoreMartyr, Chancellor of England
1535 (July 9)

From Lives of Saintswith Excerpts from their writingsPublished by John J. Crawley & Co., Inc. New York,
Nihil Obstat: John M. A. Fearns, S.T.D., Censor Librorum
Imprimatur: +Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York
August 7, 1954

Twice in the history of England there appears the figure of a great martyr
who was also chancellor of the realm. Thomas Becket, whose story appears
earlier in this volume, gave his life to keep the English Church safe from
royal aggression; Thomas more gave his in a vain effort to preserve it
from further aggression. Each was a royal favorite who loved God more
than his king. The coincidence is striking, although on closer comparison
the differences are also striking; first, those of time and statue,
between the high ecclesiastic of the late twelfth century and the layman
of the Renaissance; and, more importantly, the differences in character
and way of life.

Thomas More's father was a highly-esteemed citizen of London,
Sir John More, lawyer and judge; his mother was Agnes, daughter of Thomas
Grainger. He was born on Milk Street, Cheapside, on February 7, 1478. As
a child he was sent to St. Anthony's School in Threadneedle Street, whose
director, Nicholas Holt, a fine Latin scholar, taught boys of good family
their classics. At the age of thirteen Thomas was taken into the
household of John Morton, archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor,
who was soon to become a cardinal. It had long been a custom for
promising youths to be placed in the homes of noblemen and ranking
churchmen to learn the ways of great gentlefolk. Thomas admired Morton
and he, fortunately, liked the boy, and was instrumental in having him
sent on to Canterbury College, Oxford. Sir John More was very strict with
his son, allowing him money only for necessities. Later in life Thomas
admitted that his father's parsimony during this period had the good
effect of keeping him at the studies which he really loved. Linacre, the
finest Greek Scholar in England, was his tutor and inspired him with such
a zest for Greek literature that his father feared for the legal career he
had planned for his son, and called him home after only two years at the
university. By this time Thomas knew Greek, French, and mathematics,
spoke Latin as well as English, and could play the lute and the viol—all
proper accomplishments for a young gentlemen of that day.

In February, 1496, he was admitted as a student to Lincoln's
Inn; in 1501, at twenty-three, he was called to the bar, and for three
years thereafter was reader in law at Furnival's Inn; then he entered
Parliament. He was already a close friend of the eminent Dutch humanist,
Desiderius Erasmus, who had been teaching Greek at Cambridge and Oxford.
Among other friends were Colet, the scholarly dean of St. Paul's, and
William Lilly, with whom he composed epigrams in Latin from the Greek
Anthology. He lectured on St. Augustine's City of God at the
church of St. Lawrence Jewry, of which Willaim Grocyn was rector. All in
all, Thomas More was a versatile, brilliant, and successful young man, as
well as extremely popular and charming. Of his sense of humor, Erasmus
wrote, "From childhood he had such a love for witty jests that he seemed
to have been sent into the world for the sole purpose of coining them; he
never descends to buffoonery, but gravity and dignity were never made for
him. He is always amiable and good-tempered, and puts everyone who meets
him in a happy frame of mind."

More was seriously perplexed as to his vocation. He was
strongly attracted by the austere life of the Carthusian monks, and had
some leaning too towards the Friars Minor of the Observance; but there
seemed to be no real call to either the monastic life or the secular
priesthood. Though he remained a man of the world, he kept throughout
life certain ascetic practices; for many years he wore a hair shirt next
his skin, and followed the rules of Church discipline for Fridays and
vigils; every day he assisted at a Mass and recited the Little Office of
Our Lady.

At about this time More met a certain John Colt of Essex, and
became acquainted with his family, which included three daughters. More
now took the decisive step of marriage, choosing the eldest daughter,
Jane. According to his son-in-law, William Roper, he thought the second
daughter fairest, "yet when he considered it would be both great grief and
some shame also to the eldest to see her younger sister preferred before
her in marriage, he then, of a certain pity, framed his fancy towards her,
and soon after married her." He and Jane were nevertheless very happy
together; he set himself to teach her the literary and musical
accomplishments which the wife of a man in More's position needed to have.

Four children were born to them, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily,
and John. In addition, several children of friends were reared in their
household, and here More tried out his original ideas in education. The
house was for years a center of learning and culture, and of high good
spirits as well. The girls were taught as carefully as the boys, a
practice for which More had the authority of "prudent and holy ancients,"
such as St. Jerome and St. Augustine. At mealtime a passage from the
Scriptures, with a short commentary, was read aloud by one of the
children; afterwards there was singing and merry conversation; cards and
dicing were forbidden. Family and servants met together for evening
prayers. More himself built and endowed a chapel in his parish church of
Chelsea, and even when he had attained the rank of Lord Chancellor he sang
in the choir, dressed in the ordinary surplice.

He was extremely sensitive to the sufferings of others. "More
was used," wrote a friend, "whenever in his house or in the village he
lived in there was a woman in labor, to begin praying, and so continue
until news was brought him that the delivery had come happily to pass. . .
. His charity was without bounds, as is proved by the frequent and
abundant alms he poured without distinction among all unfortunate
persons. He used himself to go through the back lanes and inquire into
the state of poor families. . . . He often invited to his table his
poorer neighbors, receiving them . . . familiarly and joyously; he rarely
invited the rich, and scarcely ever the nobility. . . . In his parish of
Chelsea he hired a house in which he gathered many infirm, poor, and old
people, and maintained them at his own expense." But if the rich were
rarely seen at his house, his friends Grocyn, Linacre, Colet, Lilly, and
Fisher, all distinguished for scholarship and virtue, were frequent
visitors; and famour men from across the Channel sought him out—Erasmus,
whom we have spoken of, and Holbein, who has left us a fine portrait of
More as well as a beautiful drawing of the More family group.

The first years of his married life were spent in Bucklersbury.
Here in spare time More translated from Latin into English the life of the
Italian humnist, Pico della Mirandola, and, with Erasmus, some
Dialogues of the second-century satirist, Lucian of Samosata, from
Greek into Latin. In 1508 he was abroad visiting the Universities of
Louvain and Paris. He may also have had a hand in Erasmus' most popular
work, The Praise of Folly, written in More's house that same year.
More had led the opposition in Parliament to excessive royal taxation, and
brought the king's ire down on himself and his father, old Sir John More,
who was imprisoned in the Tower for a time and fined a hundred pounds. In
1509 King Henry VII died, and the accession of the youthful Henry VIII
meant a rise in worldly favor and fortune for the More family. The
following year Thomas was elected a bencher of Lincoln's Inn and appointed
undersheriff for the city of London, an office of considerable importance.

An almost the same time, his "little Utopia," as More called
the family group, was sadly shaken by the death of his dutiful young
wife. Since More was preoccupied with many diverse interests and duties,
he needed someone to care for the four children. Within a short time,
therefore, he married Alice Middleton, a widow seven years his senior, a
practical and kindly woman. Erasmus wrote of this marriage: "A few months
after his wife's death, he married a widow. . . . She was neither young
nor fair, with whom he lived as pleasantly and sweetly as if she had all
the charms of youth. You will scarcely find a husband who by authority or
severity has gained such ready compliance as More by playful flattery."

Some years later More bought a new house and garden in
Chelsea, then a small country village. It was his home until his death.
In 1515 he was away for six months in Flanders, as a member of an English
delegation to negotiate new trade agreements with the merchants of the
Hanseatic League. In the intervals of leisure between business trips to
Antwerp, he now worked on the famous Utopia, which he published the
following year. There is no space here to discuss fully the significance
of this remarkable book. It is proof both of More's thoughtful reading of
Plato and of his profound interest in the social, economic, and political
problems of his own time. As undersheriff since 1510, he had been brought
into contact with much suffering, destitution, injustice, and
unemployment. His picture of a commonwealth that was happier and
radically different from the realm of England, one that was free from
poverty and inequality, was both a challenge to constructive political
thinking on the part of the statesmen of Europe and a plea for a better
life for people in general. He wrote the book in Latin, that it might be
read by the educated everywhere, and since it was both brilliant and
provocative, it produced strong reactions—amusement, horror, or
admiration. Within three years after its first appearance in Louvain it
was published in Paris, Basle, Florence, Vienna, and Venice. It is
Utopia that gives More his high place in the fields of social
philosophy and letters.

The king and Cardinal Wolsey were now set on having More's
services at the court. More had no illusions about Henry or court life,
and knew that he could do little to remedy the vices which prevailed in
the royal circle. Yet his conscience told him that that was no reason for
"forsaking the commonwealth," and that which he could not turn to good, he
must "so order that it be not very bad." In the year Utopia was
published he was obliged to accept from the king an annual pension of a
hundred pounds; in 1517 he became a member of the King's Council and a
judge in the Court of Requests. As a member of the Council he accompanied
Henry to the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," where the kings of England and
France vied with one another in magnificence and in making promises that
were soon broken. He was taken as Wolsey's confidant on a diplomatic
mission to Calais and Bruges. In 1521 he was appointed under-treasurer,
and privy-councilor, and raised to knighthood. His awards and honors make
a long catalogue: grants of land in Oxfordshire and Kent; Latin orator in
1523, when the Emperor Charles V paid a state visit to London; speaker of
the House of Commons, and author of the answer to Martin Luther's attack
on the king's book, Defense of the Seven Sacraments; steward of
Oxford University in 1524 and of Cambridge University in 1525, and
chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; again, in 1527, with Wolsey to
France, and two years later with Bishop Tunstal of London to Cambrai to
sign the treaty which meant a temporary pause in the wars of Europe. In
October, 1529, Henry chose him as chancellor to succeed Wolsey, who had
roused the king's wrath by opposing his scheme for nullifying his
marriage. Thomas More was the first layman to hold the office.

Erasmus gives us a picture of More at this period: "In
serious matters no man's advice is more prized, while if the king wishes
to recreate himself, no man's conversation is gayer. Often there are deep
and intricate matters that demand a grave and prudent judge. More
unravels them in such a way that he satisfied both sides. No one,
however, has ever prevailed on him to receive a gift for his decision.
Happy the commonwealth where kings appoint such officials! His elevation
has brought with it no pride. . . . You would say that he had been
appointed public guardian of those in need." Another tribute from More's
confessor speaks of his remarkable purity and devotion. But in spite of
his many honors and achievements, the public esteem which he enjoyed, and
the many tokens of the royal regard, More knew well that there was no
security in his position. "Son Roper," he once said to his son-in-law, "I
may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would
win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go."

Although Henry's relations with the Pope had by this time
become strained, More's time and thought were largely taken up with the
general movement against Church authority in England. He composed answers
to Protestant attacks and dealt with problems of heresy. Tyndale, then
the leading English Protestant, was his ablest opponent. This scholar and
reformer had left England for the Continent, in order to find freedom for
the work he wished to do. At Worms he published the first Protestant
translation of the New Testament from the Greek text, and at Marburg a
translation of the Pentateuch. Tyndale was a better popular debater than
More; the Chancellor was moderate and fair, and could top off his
scholarly argument with a shaft of wit, but his style was less vigorous
and trenchant. As a controversial writer his chief work was A Dialogue
. . . Wherein he treated Divers Matters, as of the Veneration and Worship
of Images and Relics, Praying to Saints, and Going on Pilgrimage. With
many other things touching the pestilent sect of Luther and Tyndale . . .
(London, 1529) Tyndale replied in 1531, and two years later More
published a Confutation, a discursive treatise in which he touched
incidentally on the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility.

In his Apology and again in The Debellation of Salem
and Bitance (both in 1533) he defended the principle of punishment of
heresy by secular power on the ground that it threatened the peace and
safety of the commonwealth. As Chancellor it was his duty to administer
the civil laws of England, which prescribed the death penalty for
obstinate heretics. Nevertheless, during his term of office only four, it
seems were burned, and these were replapsed persons, whom he had no power
to reprieve. Actually, it was heresy and not the heretics that More tried
to get rid of.

One of Tyndale's vehement charges against the Catholics was
what he called their failure to give the complete Bible to the people in a
language they understood. His own translations were being smuggled into
England from the Continent and avidly read. More favored the
dissemination of selected books of Scripture in the vernacular; the
reading of other books, he thought, should be at the discretion of every
man's bishop, who would probably "suffer some to read the Acts of the
Apostles whom he would not suffer to meddle with the Apocalypse." More
added that some of the best minds among the Catholic clergy were also of
this opinion.

When at length the break between King Henry and the Pope
became open and the English clergy were commanded by Henry to acknowledge
him as "Protector and Supreme Head of the Church of England, . . . so far
as the law of Christ allows," More wished to resign his office, but was
persuaded to retain it and turn his attention to Henry's "great
matter"—his petition for a nullification of his marriage with Catherine of
Aragon, on the ground that she had previously been the wife of his dead
brother Arthur. The actual reason behind the petition was Henry's desire
for a male heir and his infatuation with a young woman of the court, Anne
Boleyn. The idea had been mooted first in 1527, and the failure in 1529
of a papal commission under Cardinal Campeggio to grant Henry's request,
had been the cause of the downfall of Wolsey, who, the King thought, might
have persuaded Campeggio to decide in his favor.

This drawn-out affair, which shook Christendom to its very
foundations, was indeed so involved as to fact and law, that men of good
will might well disagree on it. More, after much study of Church
authorities, had become convinced of the validity of Henry's marriage to
Catherine, but, as a layman, had been allowed to refrain from taking sides
publicly. When, in March, 1531, he reported to Parliament on the state of
the case, he was asked for his opinion and refused to give it. In 1532
came the "submission of the clergy," who were now forced to promise to
make no new laws without the King's consent and to submit to the laws they
had to a commission for revision. Later in the year an Act of Parliament
prohibited the payment of annates, or first year's income from Church
appointments, to the Holy See. At this More could no longer stand by in
silence. To Henry's exasperation, he opposed the measure openly, and on
May 16 offered his resignation as chancellor. He had held the office for
less than three years.

The loss of his office and its perquisites reduced More to
comparative poverty. Gathering his family around him he cheerfully
explained the situation, adding, "Then we may yet with bags and wallets go
a-begging together, and hoping that for pity some good folk will give us
their charity, at every man's door to sing Salve Regina, and so
keep company and be merry together." For the next eighteen months he
lived very quietly, occupied with writing. He declined to attend the
coronation of Anne Boleyn, though by the King's order three bishops wrote
asking him to come and sent him money to pay for the necessary robes. He
kept the money and stayed at home, explaining to the bishops that his
honor would not allow him to grant their request, but that he accepted the
money with gratitude and without scruple, since they were rich and he was
poor.

More was not permitted to escape the royal displeasure. The
case of the so-called "Holy Maid of Kent" served as a means of
incriminating him. This woman, a Benedictine nun by the name of Elizabeth
Barton, had for some time been creating a sensation by falling into
trances and seeing visions, on the strength of which she warned evildoers
of terrors to come. Eventually she was prevailed upon to condemn Henry's
treatment of Catherine and prophesy his early death. In consequence she
was seized, imprisoned in the Tower, and in April, 1534, executed for
treason. In the bill of attainder drawn up against her were included, as
sharers in her guilt, the saintly bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, and
Thomas More. Fisher had been impressed by the nun's revelations, and More
had seen and spoken to her, and at first given some countenance to her
claims, though he ended by calling her a "false, deceiving hypocrite."
The Lords expressed a wish to hear More for themselves in his defense.
Henry, knowing well that More had many stanch friends in Parliament, had
the charge against him withdrawn.

In March Pope Clement VII formally pronounced the marriage of
Henry and Catherine valid and therefore not to be annulled. A week later
an Act of Succession was pushed through Parliament, requiring all the
king's subjects to take oath to the effect that his union with Catherine
had been no lawful marriage, that his union with Anne Boleyn was a true
marriage, and that their offspring would be legitimate heirs to the
throne, regardless of the objections of "any foreign authority, prince, or
potentate." Opposition to this Act was declared high treason. On April
13 More and Fisher were offered the oath before a royal commission at
Lambeth; they accepted the new line of royal succession established by the
Act but refused to subscribe to it as a whole, since it was a clear
defiance of the Pope's authority to decide a question involving a
sacrament of the Church. Thereupon Thomas More was committed to the
custody of one of the commissioners, William Benson, abbot of
Westminster. Henry's new favorite, Thomas Cranmer, urged the King to
compromise, but he would not. The oath was again tendered and again
refused, and More was imprisoned in the Tower.

The fifteen months that he spent in prison were borne with a
serene spirit; the tender love of his wife and children, especially that
of his daughter, Margaret, comforted him. He rejected all efforts of wife
and friends to induce him to take the oath and so pacify Henry. Visitors
were forbidden towards the end, and in his solitude he wrote the noblest
of his religious works, the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.

In November he was formally charged
with the crime of treason, and all the lands and honors granted him by the
Crown were forfeited. Save for a small pension from the Order of St. John
of Jerusalem, his family was almost penniless; Lady More sold her fine
clothing to buy necessaries for him, and twice she petitioned the king for
his release on the plea of sickness and poverty. In February, 1535, the
Act of Supremacy came into operation; this conferred the title of Supreme
Head of the Church of England, without qualification, on the king, and
made it treason to refuse it. In April, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's
hardfisted new secretary and councilor, called on More to elicit from him
his opinion of this Act, but he would not give it. Margaret visited him
on May 4, for the last time, and from the window of his cell they watched
three Carthusian priors and one Bridgittine, who would not acknowledge a
civil supremacy over the Church, go to their execution. "Lo, dost thou
not see, Meg," he said, "that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully
going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage? . . . Whereas thy
silly father, Meg, that like a most wicked caitiff hath passed the whole
course of his miserable life most sinfully, God, thinking him not worthy
so soon to come to that eternal felicity, leaving him here yet still in
the world, further to be plagued and turmoiled with misery." A few days
later Cromwell with other officials questioned him again and taunted him
for his silence. "I have not," he said gently, "been a man of such holy
living as I might be bold to offer myself to death, lest God for my
presumption might suffer me to fall."

On June 22 Bishop John Fisher was beheaded on Tower Hill.
Nine days later More himself was formally indicted and tried in
Westminster Hall. By this time he was so weak that he was permitted to
sit during the proceedings. He was charged with having opposed the Act of
Supremacy, both in conversation with members of the Council who had
visited him in prison, and in an alleged discussion with Rich, the
solicitor-general. More maintained that he had always refrained from
talking with anyone on the subject and that Rich was swearing falsely.
However, he was found guilty and condemned to death. Then at last he
spoke out his mind firmly. No temporal lord, he said, could or ought to
be head of the spirituality. But even as St. Paul persecuted St. Stephen
"and yet be they now both twain holy saints in Heaven, and shall continue
there friends for ever, so I verily trust, and shall therefore right
heartily pray, that though your lordships have now here in earth been
judges of my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in Heaven merrily all meet
together to everlasting salvation."

On his way back to the Tower he said farewell to Margaret, who
broke through the guard to reach him, and four days later, now deprived of
pen and ink, he wrote her his last letter with a piece of coal, sending
with it his hair shirt, a relic now in care of the Canonesses Regular of
Newton Abbot. Early in the morning of July 7, Sir Thomas Pope, a friend,
came to inform him that he was to die that day at nine o'clock. More
thanked him, said he would pray for the king, and with talk of a joyful
meeting in Heaven strove to cheer up his weeping friend. When the hour
came he walked out to Tower Hill, and mounted the scaffold, with a jest
for the lieutenant who helped him climb it. To the bystanders he spoke
briefly, asking for their prayers and their witness that he died in faith
of the Holy Catholic Church and as the king's loyal subject. He then
knelt and repeated the psalm Miserere; after which he encouraged
the executioner, though warning him that his neck was very short and he
must take heed to "strike not awry." So saying, he laid down his head and
was beheaded at one stroke. His body was buried in the church of St.
Peter-ad-Vincula within the Tower; his head, after being exposed on London
Bridge, was given to Margaret and laid in the Roper vault in the church of
St. Dunstan, outside the West Gate of Canterbury. There, presumably, it
still is, beneath the floor under the organ, at the east end of the south
aisle.

More was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886, along with other
English martyrs, and canonized in 1935. Had he never met death for the
faith he still would have been a candidate for canonization as a
confessor. From first to last his life was singularly pure, lived in the
spirit of his own prayer: "Give me, good Lord, a longing to be with Thee;
not for the avoiding of the calamities of this wicked world, nor so much
for the avoiding the pains of purgatory, nor the pains of Hell neither,
nor so much for the attaining of the joys of Heaven in respect of mine own
commodity, as even for a very love of Thee."